In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul urges us to live "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation and constant in prayer." Pope Francis, in his Wednesday catecheses, has been encouraging us to grow in hope. But what are the obstacles that make this difficult? How can we exercise this necessary theological virtue and overcome discouragement, despair or the deceitfulness of presumption?
–José Manuel Martín Quemada
The virtue of hope concerns in a very particular way our condition as creatures and, above all, the desire for God that God himself has placed in the heart of the person. Therefore, in a very particular way, hope is the virtue of holiness. It is the one that structures our walk towards God, and the one that sustains us along the way, as described in Cristina, daughter of Lavrans, the great epic of Norwegian literature. In that work, the protagonists resist in the good despite their mistakes and sins, and emerge from the desire for God present in their journey. The author Sigrid Undset herself will convert to Catholicism soon after finishing the novel, attracted by a Christian "humanity" based not on a vain moralism, but on the possibility of a greater understanding of the human and its higher destiny...
